THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
pels gave it — " this is the body of Christ " — without troubling itself to reason at length on the meaning of the words. This view appears so selfevident in the above-cited passage of Ignatius (Smi/rn. vii. 1) that he says the heretics abstained from the communion because they did not believe " the eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior, Jesus Christ." And even the Gnostic heretics, who (in spite of what Ignatius says) had some sort of a Eucharist of their own, apparently all retained the designation of the elements as the body and blood of Christ, in spite of their docetism and spiritualism; Irenaeus argues against them (IV., xviii. 4) as if this designation were common ground. The practise of the Church bears out the same contention. Tertullian {De corona, iii.) and Origen (on Exod. xiii. 3) both speak, as of an old-established tradition, of the great care taken that no crumb or drop of the elements should fall to the ground. The oldest formula of administration known, going back certainly to the third century, is simply " the body of Christ, the blood of Christ, the cup of life." The same conception is evidenced by the reports of " Thyestean banquets " attributed by the heathen to the Christians in the second decade of the second century, in Asia (Pliny's letter to Trajan) and in Rome (Tacitus, Annates, xv. 44). In a word, following the "this is " of the Gospels, in the methods of speech used by the Church, catechetical as well as liturgical, in the popular belief, and in the practise based on that belief, the Eucharist was the body and blood of Christ.
The very circumstance, however, that this same fact is met alike among Gnostics and their opponents, in the writings of an Origen and of a Tertullian, should warn against concluding from it the prevalence of a realistic conception
lkfluenctal (whether of a Roman Catholic or a uponthe8 Lutheran kind) in the early Church. Conception. Tne same thing may be inferred from the fact that no early apologist thinks it necessary to defend this designation of the elements as the body and blood of Christ against pagan opponents as anything irrational. Justin shows no consciousness that this must seem a stranger doctrine to the heathen than the incarnation or the resurrection; similar language is as much a matter of course to Origen writing against Celsus. But it would be equally unjustifiable to conclude that the language of the early Church may be understood in a Zwinglian or Calvinistic sense. The Fathers, whether Eastern or Western, must be interpreted by the presuppositions of their own times. Strauss draws a distinction (Leben Jesu, ii. 437, 1st ed.) between the Oriental mind, which thinks in images, and the more abstract Western habit of thought. Yet it must be remembered that under the Empire the religious life of the West was permeated by Oriental influences. " Mysteries " were a natural concomitant of religion; and the idea that in a mystery earthly elements could " become " divine by the working of some invisible power without any change of their substance, was not unknown to the pagan philosophy of the West. It is now generally recognized that the Gnosticism of the second and third cen-
turies understood or shaped Christian traditions according to the idea of mysteries; and, while it is not so universally admitted, it may safely be said that the same influence of pagan religious tradition which led in Gnosticism to " an acute Hellenizing of Christianity " (Harnack) began, about the same time, though more slowly and gradually, to have an effect on the Church which condemned Gnosticism. This is most clearly seen in the history of baptism and the Lord's Supper. The very name sacramenta is a token of this. Tertullian is the first author who can be shown to have spoken of sacramentum baptismatis et eucharistice; but the idea is found in Clement of Alexandria, and is not far off in Justin. The developed Arcani Discipline, (q.v.) of the fourth and following centuries must have been a consequence of this tendency, and thus later than the tendency itself. So, since the beginnings of the disciplina are found in Tertullian, the beginnings of the development which led to the Hellenizing of Christian worship must go back to the first half of the second century. The atmosphere of mystery thus inherited from the ancient world favored the leaving of the questions about which after ages contended without a definite and precise answer. A " symbolic " conception of the sacramental gift by no means excluded one which might be called " realistic." Harnack points out that whereas by "symbol" now is understood a thing which is not what it signifies, then it meant (for many people, at least) a thing which was, in some sense, what it signified. That the bread and wine were, in some sense, the body and blood of Christ was accepted in the second century, as has been seen. But this affirmation lay within the sphere of mystery, meaning different things to different persons according to the extent of their spiritual attainment; it was in no sense a defined dogma. This explains the fact that the doctrine of the Eucharist shows a much less regular development than the dogmas of the early Church, such as that of the Trinity or of the person of Christ.
The first important step in such development as there was is connected with the application of the idea of sacrifice to the Lord's Supper. The fact has often been overlooked that this application is unscriptural. It made its first appearance, to be sure, under the aspect of New-Testa-
8'ofs!criuement thouShts- Praver was sP°ken ficia"" °* as *^e sacrifice of the lips (Heb. xiii. Conception. 15>' c^- Rev. v. 8, viii. 3; Hos. xiv. 2); to do good and to communicate was to offer a sacrifice with which God was well pleased (Heb. xiii. 16). So it was not far to considering in the same light the offerings of love which served for the Eucharist, and, so far as they were not needed for that, for the necessities of the poor (Polycarp, Ad Phil. iv. 2). But the thing soon went further than this; even the Didache (xiv. 3) regards the Lord's Supper, in the words of the famous prophecy of Malachi (i. 11), as the "pure offering " of the new covenant. This might have been of little consequence if the Eucharist had remained, as it appears in Ignatius and in the Didache, a real meal, or connected with one, and if the " giving thanks " had remained an act of the com-